Books in the Global Health Histories series

Suman Seth offers dramatically new ways to understand the mutual construction of medicine, race, and empire in the eighteenth century. Readers will find medical writers engaging with abolitionism and the care of the enslaved, and will be able to track the ways that medicine created modern notions of racial difference.

A history of the World Health Organization, covering major achievements in its seventy years while also highlighting the organization's internal tensions. This account by three leading historians of medicine examines how well the organization has pursued its aim of everyone, everywhere attaining the highest possible level of health.

This new and unique visual history of AIDS focuses on the AIDS atlas, published by dedicated clinicians between 1986 and 2008. The epidemic's history is retold through clinical photographs, epidemiological maps and icons of HIV asking how this devastating epidemic has come to be seen as a controllable chronic condition.

Hungary was one of the first countries to introduce a national oral vaccination campaign against polio, built on years of scientific collaboration between East and West. Dora Vargha uses a series of polio epidemics in communist Hungary to understand the response to a global public health emergency in the midst of the Cold War. This title is also available as Open Access.

Hans Pols proposes a new perspective on the history of colonial medicine from the viewpoint of indigenous physicians. The Indonesian medical profession in the Dutch East Indies actively participated in political affairs by joining and leading nationalist associations, by publishing in newspapers and magazines, and by becoming members of city councils and the colonial parliament. Indonesian physicians were motivated by their medical training, their experiences as physicians, and their subordinate position within the colonial health care system to organise, lead, and join social, cultural, and political associations. Opening with the founding of Indonesia's first political association in 1908 and continuing with the initiatives of the Association of Indonesian Physicians, Pols describes how the Rockefeller Foundation's projects inspired the formulation of a nationalist health programme. Tracing the story through the Japanese annexation, the war of independence, and independent Indonesia, Pols reveals the relationship between medicine and decolonisation, and the role of physicians in Asian history.